The power of just giving things a try…
Experiments & Fear
In this video, I talk candidly about experimenting with technology and the fear that often holds us back. From trying out a new microphone to encouraging you to just “click and see what happens,” I share my own real-world mishaps and how they’re part of learning. Fear of breaking something or losing data is real, but with a good backup and a little confidence, you’ll be surprised how much you can do on your own. My goal is to help you feel more comfortable exploring, experimenting, and ultimately gaining confidence with your tech.
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Transcript
(Automated)
Let’s chat about experimentation and fear.
Hey gang, Editing Leo here. After I recorded this video and started to watch it back and edit it, I noticed the glare in my glasses as I’m speaking to you. Since I know a lot of you are going to notice that and perhaps even find it quite distracting, I want to say I’m sorry. And it’s again something that I’ll be attempting to address in future videos, but hopefully won’t get in the way too much this time.
Hi everyone, Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com.
I think by now if you’ve seen the first couple of episodes of this little chat series, you understand that it’s an experiment. I’m trying something different to see how it resonates, how it works for me, all that kind of stuff.
In fact, this episode is itself an experiment within the experiment. The experiment, the thing that I’m testing this episode, is this little guy here. It’s a different lapel mic. It served me well for a different environment a couple of weeks ago in one of my volunteer roles. And I want to see now if it’s going to do good things for these kinds of talk to the camera and perhaps wander about videos.
Everything’s an experiment. In fact, if you take a look at my blog home page, you’ll see that that’s one of the captions or quotes that I have off to one side. That’s in a sense part of my philosophy to life. Everything is in one way or another an experiment. We try things out and see what happens.
Of course, experiments can fail. And that’s why in this case there wasn’t a video last week. I sat down here. I recorded a video of this thing that I’m experimenting here. It failed. Or rather, I failed. The microphone was on upside down with the microphone part actually pressed against my shirt. I’m pretty sure that the cable that connects the microphone to its receiver to the camera, that too may have been unplugged while I did this.
So you get the idea. Stuff happens. That’s the nature of experimentation. But the nature of experimentation really is kind of sort of, gee, I wonder what happens if I do this. I wonder what happens if I do this kind of video format. I wonder what happens if I use this kind of microphone. I wonder what happens if I make some other random change to the process.
I wonder what happens if I click here.
And that’s why I’m talking to you today about experimentation and fear.
One of the more frustrating questions I get, and it’s common enough that it does kind of get me frustrated when I see it, is folks asking, if I do this, what will happen? Okay, legitimate question. I mean, I totally get it. You’re not sure. If you’re wondering about something and it may do something, it may not.
Why aren’t you trying? Why aren’t you taking the five minutes, 30 seconds, whatever it might be, to actually give whatever it is a try, if it’s something that’s within that scope, rather than submitting a question, waiting sometimes days for a response from me?
The secret behind many of those responses is that I have no clue. I really don’t. So what do I do? Give it a try. Whatever it is, you ask me, what happens if I do this? Well, I don’t know. I’ll do this and I’ll see what happens and report back.
You didn’t have to wait for that. You could have done the experiment yourself and gotten the answer instantly without having to rely on anybody else.
Now, I do get it.
That’s why the second part of this video title is about fear. I think there’s a lot of fear. But in this case, if you’re asking if you do this on your computer, the fear is either of the computer itself. You’re just generally afraid of the computer, which makes me sad, but it’s one of my reasons for existence because I try very hard to give you more confidence or give you reasons to have more confidence about interacting with your computer.
There’s a fear of data loss. I totally get that. If you are asking, what happens if I drag and drop this file into this other random location, not realizing that maybe that’s a location that would make everything disappear or have a problem or whatever, I totally get that. It tells me, though, that if you are afraid of losing data, well, you’re not backed up. That is one of my themes, if you will, on Ask Leo. It’s one of the things I talk about way too much.
But I’m often puzzled because what I see is the test, the experiment that you could run without ever having to even ask the question has no downside. It’s a very quick, yo, this is what happens when I do that. Or, okay, this is what happens. Now I know how to do that. And now because I know how to do that, I know how to undo that.
Experimentation really is your friend. And one of the reasons that I’ve made it a topic today is that I really want to encourage you to become more comfortable with experimentation. Try things to mangle a common phrase, fool around and find out. See what happens. Because very often what you’ll find out is very useful. At most benign, at worst, I should say benign. But it’s often very useful knowledge that then helps you to use your technology, do your tasks, do your whatever’s more efficiently or more comfortably in the future.
Perhaps a good paradigm to apply to these kinds of situations is to simply ask the question, what’s the worst that can happen?
Interestingly enough, I’ve adopted that approach for, well, for decades. Years ago when I was about to take my test for getting my driver’s license, 16 years old here in the United States. And of course, there’s a lot of angst and anxiety around taking the test, passing the test, getting your license. I had the additional burden or requirement that assuming I got my license, I would be driving myself to school the very next day. If I didn’t get my license, we were going to have to make some other alternatives.
But what was interesting about it is that I did absolutely walk into it with the mindset of, what’s the worst that can happen? Honestly, the worst wasn’t really that bad. If I failed, well, yeah, we’d have to make some different arrangements here and I’d have to take the test again there. And you get the idea.
What that allowed me to do though was relax. And of course, because I was able to relax, I did fine. I passed the test. Parallel parking is still a thing, but you know, whatever. The rest of the test went fine.
But the bottom line is that sometimes understanding that the worst that can happen is not as bad as you think gives you permission to play, to experiment, to try things. And yes, while that’s probably a fine general life philosophy, my focus here is on your technology. My focus here is on your computer. Give it a try.
Like I said, the thing I would have you take away from this little conversation is simply that. Do it. Experiment. Fool around and find out. Have some fun with it. Just back up first. It really can be that simple. And it’s a heck of a lot quicker than waiting for me.
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As always, I look forward to your comments below this video if you’re on YouTube or below this video on the web page where this video and its transcript will get posted. I’m Leo Notenboom and this is askleo .com. Thanks for watching.
I’ve been following Ask Leo! for over 10 years. I took to heart Leo’s preaching about backups and have become proficient in not only setting up a backup routine on all the household computers, but also in restoring backups.
That has led to my willingness to experiment and see what I can do. I’ve modified Windows 11 on my computer to the point that if someone else were to sit down and use it, there would be a long pause while they tried to figure out why it doesn’t look like any other computer-beginning with the Start Menu. And it isn’t a third party add-on, just some Group Policy and registry tweaks.
Have I broken Windows in the course of experimenting? Yep, that’s what backups are for. When Microsoft introduces some “improvement” that I find too irritating, I can usually find some way of changing it somewhere on the web. Either on Microsoft’s own websites or on a couple of other sites that I consider trustworthy.
I go further than most people would, but hey, I’m retired and needed a hobby.
I too am retired, and have been for over a decade. When I first started using a computer, some pundit of the time stated: “Experiment. You won’t break anything beyond repair, unless you get physically abusive with the hardware.” I was using MS-DOS 3.1 at the time, and I was an avid reader of BBS boards, on which hackers discussed their experiments (NOTE: hackers are NOT crackers! They experiment with their computers to see “What will happen if …”). Crackers is the correct term for those miscreants who inundate us with all that malware. Those animals aren’t hackers, they’re crackers, although they may do similar experiments. The difference is their intent.
Back in my MS-DOS days, my experimentation was done mostly by creating batch files, or writing assembly scripts that I could compile with debug, and execute. Today, I experiment with bash in GNU/Linux, and Powershell in Windows, and by finding utilities I can use to make either Windows or GNU/Linux do things the way I want them to. For one example, I found a tool named ‘Starship’ that allows me to customize my bash prompt by creating and editing a configuration file named ‘starship.toml’, stored in the .config directory for my GNU/Linux user space. While at the developer’s website, I discovered that they produce a version for Windows, so I got it too, and now the command prompts for both my GNU/Linux terminal emulator and the Powershell terminal both look as similar as the two OSes allow. All I had to do in Windows was install starship, then create a .config folder under “C:\users\$USER”, and put a copy of my starship.toml file in it. Another experiment allows my Arch-based Garuda Linux installation to load with secure-boot enabled, and to automatically sign the new kernel image following an update. Garuda doesn’t support secure boot out-of-the-box, and it doesn’t sign the system kernel image, so, by default, secure boot must be disabled, or Garuda won’t load.
The bottom line to all of this is, if you have a good backup regimen in place (periodic full system images accompanied by daily incremental/differential images), and you synchronize your important files (e.g.: those files you don’t want to risk losing) to a cloud service of your choice, you won’t break your computer, at least not badly enough that you can’t recover from anything you do ‘wrong’. It has been my experience that I learn as much, if not more, from the mistakes I’ve made than I learn from my successes. In fact, my successes are nearly always the result of an incremental progression of failures, until I learn enough to understand what works. I’ve come to call my experiments ‘adventures’, because they truly are. When I embark on a new adventure, I get excited, anticipating what’s to come, and when I find the solution to whatever I’m trying to learn to do, the satisfaction is greater than words can describe, because “I did that!” 🙂
I hope that everyone who reads this learns to find as much adventure in experimenting as I have,
Ernie